Wiki News Live
Today:
H5N1 Detected in Pig Highlights the Risk of Bird Flu Mixing with Seasonal Flu
NEWS | 06 November 2024
People who get infected with H5N1 bird flu, such as dairy farm workers, could be coinfected with seasonal flu, setting the stage for dangerous viral mixing known as reassortment. Now, as the usual seasonal flu season approaches, some health experts wonder if it might give bird flu a dangerous boost. Spillovers of human seasonal viruses into pigs happen fairly regularly, says Amy Baker, a research veterinary medical officer at the USDA. This risk is a reason the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged farm workers to get their seasonal flu shots. That fact, Webby says, suggests “the hurdles are high that this virus has to overcome to become a human virus.

Top Stories:
Dora Richardson Took Her Research Underground to Develop Lifesaving Tamoxifen
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Viviane Quirke: At that time, When Dora Richardson synthesized tamoxifen, there were no drugs specifically targeting the organs of the reproductive system. Boy do we women have a lot to thank Dora Richardson, Arthur Walpole, and Barbara Valcaccia for. And knowing that Dora Richardson never gave up on her research to find a better treatment, we hope, is both reassuring and inspirational. National Cancer Institute for more information about cancer, cancer research, and today’s cancer treatments. Craig Jordan, Who Discovered a Key Breast Cancer Drug, Dies at 76,” by Clay Risen, in The New York Times,.

World:
The Climate and the Health of our Children Is on the Ballot on November 5
NEWS | 06 November 2024
In contrast, the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, describes climate change as an “existential” threat. Infectious diseases like Lyme have been on the rise among children, largely because of climate change. Awareness of the health effects of climate change heightens kids’ risks of anxiety and other mental health problems, to the point where almost half of young people recently surveyed said that their worries about climate change were negatively affecting their daily lives. Like climate change, air pollution exposure is affecting children’s ability to learn. While all children are vulnerable, low-income, Black and Hispanic children face disproportionate exposure to air pollution in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Current Events:
Is Election Anxiety Keeping You Awake? Sleep Experts Share Advice
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Scientific American staff and sleep experts share advice on how to get better sleep in the stressful days leading up to the U.S. presidential election—and those that come afterIf the nerve-racking buildup to the U.S. presidential election has stolen your sleep, you’re not alone. He found that those who experienced more stress and depression on election day were more likely to have worse sleep that night. He was surprised that even many non-U.S. study participants reported similar stress and shifts in sleep that rose and fell with the election cycle. “If I’m kind of revved up, I’m frustrated or I’m angry, my brain is not ready [for sleep],” she says. I might feel crummy about the U.S. after Election Day, but I won’t be hung over!

News Flash:
A Bird Flu Vaccine Might Come Too Late to Save Us from H5N1
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Vaccine maker Moderna—which marketed one of the first COVID vaccines using the new, nimble mRNA technology—says it has an H5 flu virus vaccine in phase 2 trials. Pfizer, the other maker of mRNA vaccines, says it also has an H5 pandemic flu vaccine in the works but no U.S. government deal yet. This is why the flu vaccines usually change from one season to another and why flu vaccines don’t fully protect against infection. “We need a moonshot project for a universal flu vaccine,” Khan says. But he’s the first to say this wouldn’t be a universal flu vaccine but rather a primer to give people an initial level of protection.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 06 November 2024
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Latest:
How Harris’s Medicare Plan Could Make At-Home Care for Older Adults Easier
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Navigating long-term health care for older adults is an agonizing challenge faced by millions of people across the U.S. The emotional, physical and financial costs can be overwhelming for older adults who need care and for those who provide it—whether they are professional caregivers or family members. But many people wind up paying out-of-pocket; one 2024 survey estimates that the median cost of 40-hour-per-week at-home health care in the U.S. is $5,892 a month. Sometimes older adults and their families “essentially impoverish themselves and then get onto Medicaid,” Szanton says. “A lot of caregivers are older adults themselves,” Graham says.

Breaking:
There Are Three Types of Twilight
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Astronomers (among others who eagerly await the night) are so familiar with twilight that we’ve classified its various stages. The first that occurs after sunset is called civil twilight, so named because it’s when the sky is still bright enough for people to conduct typical “daytime” outdoor activities. The reason the early twilight sky is bright is because our planet is round. Closer to the equator, the sun dives in a more perpendicular fashion toward the horizon, and civil twilight there lasts less than half an hour. During civil twilight the brightest celestial objects may become visible if cloud cover or glare from artificial light sources doesn’t intervene.

Trending:
The Law Must Respond When Science Changes
NEWS | 06 November 2024
It’s been an astounding couple of weeks in the world where science and law intersect. Whereas the law seeks to provide fair process in a timely fashion, science seeks to discover truth over time. In both cases, scientific understanding changed years ago. When scientific evidence is part of a criminal prosecution, there are two critical things the legal system in the U.S. needs to do to ensure due process. In 2009 the National Academies of Science published a scathing report on the state of the science of forensic science.

This Just In:
How Superman Helped Launch the Hubble Space Telescope
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Right there on the page was a dead ringer for the real-life Hubble Space Telescope. The Large Space Telescope was Hubble. Could we really have Superman to thank for all the important discoveries and stunning images made by the Hubble Space Telescope? So I contacted Charles Robert O’Dell, an observational astronomer and lead scientist on the Large Space Telescope project from 1972 to 1983. Thirteen years later, under a new name, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched.

Today:
Spellements: Wednesday, November 6, 2024
NEWS | 06 November 2024
You can enter letters by clicking on them or typing them in. Letters can be used multiple times in a single word, and words must contain four letters or more for this size layout. Pangrams, words which incorporate all the letters available, appear in bold and receive bonus points. You can also get hints to other words in the puzzle by hitting the life preserver icon in the game display. The dictionary we use for this game misses a lot of science words, such as apatite and coati.

Top Stories:
Astrology Was an Important Science for Medieval People
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Curator Larisa Grollemond of the Getty Museum, walks us through the medieval zodiac and how someone’s sign decided their day-to-day life. She’s behind an exhibit called Rising Signs: The Medieval Science of Astrology, which the Getty Center is presenting until January 5, 2025. Grollemond: Sure, the exhibition is called Rising Signs: The Medieval Science of Astrology. And I’m hoping that people will see themselves in medieval astrology in some ways. If you’re gonna be around the LA area anytime between now and January 5, definitely check out Rising Signs: The Medieval Science of Astrology.

World:
Climate Is on State Ballots This Election
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Several downballot races in the 2024 presidential election will carry implications for climate policy far beyond state linesCLIMATEWIRE | Some of this election’s most important battlegrounds for climate policy have nothing to do with the Electoral College. Governors’ mansions, legislatures and even climate policy itself are on the ballot across the country. After years of preparing and finally passing climate policy, Democrats are about to discover how popular those actions truly are — and whether it’s safe for lawmakers elsewhere to copy them. “Once you have climate policy in place, can you implement it? Jay Inslee, who over three terms made climate a central focus of state government — and in turn made Washington a hub for climate policy wonks.

Current Events:
These Bird Nests Show Signs of an Architectural ‘Culture’
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Researchers analyzed more than 400 structures built by 43 different groups of White-browed Sparrow-Weavers in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. These birds live communally, and the entire cohort works together to build a nest and multiple roosts from grass. The scientists found that different gatherings of birds, even those living only a few meters from one another, built very different tube structures. To examine why the groups built differently, the team analyzed factors that can determine a nest’s size and shape for a given bird species: weather conditions, tree height, individuals’ body size and genetic relatedness. “They can’t actually look at the effect of, say, genetic differences, because they don’t have really good genetic information on all the individuals in these groups,” she says.

News Flash:
The Myth that Musicians Die at 27 Shows How Superstitions Are Made
NEWS | 06 November 2024
Basquiat, the explanatory text stated, died of a drug overdose at the age of 27. The film, Basquiat, made Dunivin wonder about how the 27 Club myth propagates itself and what that means for the people who are caught up in it. “The weird thing about this particular myth is: even if you don’t know about the 27 Club, you encounter more famous dead people who died at 27,” Dunivin says. Statistical models that they used reconfirmed that there is no increased risk of famous people dying at age 27. That bump indicates that people who die at age 27 “are considerably more likely to be more famous” than those who die at 26 or 28, Dunivin says.